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The Shakespeare buzz, contd.
The Vanishing Shakespeare continues to receive favorable notice from the press and from scholars who understand that English departments are remiss when they leave the study of Shakespeare up to chance. But there are critics of the study, and it's worth looking closely at their arguments.
At Dartblog, Joe Malchow has posted a response to the Shakespeare report written by self-described English professor Daniel Green.
ACTA's report defined a department as requiring Shakespeare if it either required a majority of English majors to take a dedicated Shakespeare course or if it required majors to take two out of three single-author courses on Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Milton. Taking issue with these criteria, Green complains that ACTA was remiss in excluding survey courses because--these are ACTA's words--they "do not guarantee that [they] will include Shakespeare or will provide exposure of any significant depth."
He then dismisses ACTA's determination because there may be some exceptions to the rule. "Maybe the authors are right--maybe the survey course doesn't require a study of the Bard in any depth. But what if it does?" And he offers his own undergraduate experience as evidence that some survey courses do indeed cover Shakespeare in depth. When Green was in college, he says, he took a required survey on the Elizabethan period that, while not a dedicated Shakespeare course, did cover Shakespeare intensively. Such a course, he complains, would not have been counted as a Shakespeare course according to ACTA's rubric, when, in fact, it ought to have been. On the basis of this example, Green concludes that ACTA's report "does not support its own conclusion."
There is a lot wrong with this logic.
First, Green seeks to topple ACTA's argument about institutional trends with a single anecdote--one that relates to events that occurred some time ago. ACTA's report acknowledges that English major requirements were once far more substantive than they are now; the whole point of the study is to chart declining standards. As an English professor, Green has been out of college for some time. More to the point, Green does not tell us if his alma mater still requires such a course. He also does not name his alma mater--an omission that makes it impossible to find out what its past and current requirements are.
Second, Green wrongly assumes that ACTA did not consider the question of surveys. "They could have tried to solve this problem [regarding survey courses]," he writes. "They could have looked into the course descriptions or the syllabi of the survey courses." In fact, ACTA did examine survey courses--as the study notes in the preface to Appendix A (p. 23).
Here's what ACTA found.
A very small number of schools--among them Carleton, Davidson, Ohio State, and Penn State--requires a survey course that explicitly includes Shakespeare in its official description. These courses were not counted as Shakespeare courses because they cannot, by definition, offer in-depth coverage of Shakespeare. Carleton's required survey extends from the medieval period through the seventeenth century, and covers Chaucer, Milton, and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century lyric poets in addition to Shakespeare. Davidson's extends from the medieval period through the eighteenth century, and covers Chaucer, Milton, and Donne as well as Shakespeare. Ohio State's routinely covers Beowulf, the Canterbury Tales, Spenser's Faerie Queene, Milton's Paradise Lost, poetry by Donne, Shakespeare, Dryden and Pope, and prose selections from Swift and Johnson. As these examples show, a survey by definition is devoted to broad coverage. While surveys prepare students for in-depth study of particular writers, genres, and periods, they are not and cannot be in-depth studies of Shakespeare or any other writer.
A slightly larger number of schools--Claremont McKenna, Princeton, UC San Diego, the University of Virginia, Vassar, and Notre Dame--requires surveys that do not stipulate that Shakespeare will be covered. Princeton's survey actually excludes Shakespeare: It centers on Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Pope, and Swift. UC San Diego's survey also excludes Shakespeare. The expectation in these instances seems to be that Shakespeare will be studied elsewhere, but in the absence of a requirement, it is not at all certain that students will do so.
As these examples indicate, the required British literature survey is dying out alongside Shakespeare requirements. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that almost half the departments that still require Shakespeare also still require surveys of earlier English literature. They are: Harvard, UC Berkeley, UCLA, University of the District of Columbia, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Minnesota, and University of Wisconsin at Madison. At these schools, the survey is not seen as a substitute for studying Shakespeare, but as a supplement to it.
And what about schools that require a dedicated "Elizabethan" course of the sort Green recalls taking? There are only two that even come close to meeting such a description: Barnard requires juniors to take a "Renaissance colloquium," while Duke requires students to take a course on "literary and cultural study 1500-1660." At Barnard, the colloquium is offered in multiple varieties, each centered around an opposition: "Imitation and Creation," "Skepticism and Affirmation," "Reason and Imagination," and so on. There are no specific course descriptions or syllabi published online. Students can take two Renaissance courses instead of the colloquium, but only one can be a Shakespeare course; Milton counts toward this requirement, even though he is not a Renaissance writer. Currently, Duke does use its requirement to drive students to Shakespeare courses, but it is significant that the structure of the requirement--which encompasses cultural as well as literary study and which covers the entire Tudor and Jacobean periods, the Cromwell era, and the Restoration--allows for a decidedly non-Shakespearean set of offerings. A course on Ben Jonson would fulfill it, as would a course on metaphysical poetry.
Green's defense of the academic status quo is spirited. But it does not stand up to scrutiny.
Posted by acta online on May 30, 2007 at May 30, 2007 08:45 AM
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